First On Chesil Beach got longlisted for a Bad Sex in Fiction Award from the Literary Reviewwww.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/11/23/. Then it lost the Man Booker Prize to Anne Enright’s The Gathering. And last month Atonement came up empty at the Oscars.

“Like most young men of his time, or any time, without an easy manner, or means to sexual expression, he indulged constantly in what one enlightened authority was now calling ‘self-pleasuring’ … How extraordinary it was, that a self-made spoonful, leaping clear of his body, should instantly free his mind to confront afresh Nelson’s decisiveness at Aboukir Bay.”

“Because the instrument was a cello rather than her violin, the interrogator was not herself but a detached observer, mildly incredulous, but insistent too, for after a brief silence and lingering, unconvincing reply from the other instruments, the cello put the question again, in different terms, on a different chord, and then again, and again, and each time received a doubtful answer.”

If you’d like to try to influence the outcome of the Delete Key Awards, you have until 9 p.m. Wednesday to leave a comment. Mercy or no mercy?

The latest in an occasional series on book-award winners and whether they deserved their honors

Title:Elegy: Poems. By Mary Jo Bang. Graywolf, 92 pp., $20.

What it is: Sixty-four poems about the year after the death of Bang’s 37-year-old son, an event described as an “addiction catastrophe.” Elegy consists mostly of short- or medium-lined free verse and includes the three elements of classical elegy: praise, lament and (in this case, faint) consolation.

Was this one of those awards that make you wonder if the judges were all on Class B controlled substances? No. But some of the judges did seem to be enjoying the wine at the reception after the awards ceremony on Thursday night.

Worthy of a major prize? Yes, chiefly for the poem “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” At times Elegy reads less like poetry than therapy, strewn with banal words or phrases: “describable,” “a wince-making barrenness,” “Paxil’s myoclonal kick.” Some of its ideas might have come from a card rack at Shop-Rite or a women’s-magazine article on coping with loss. (“I love you like I love / All beautiful things.” “Grief was complicated.”) But poetry collections can justify their awards with a single poem. And Elegy does it with the exceptional “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” an homage in multi-part harmony to Bang’s son, to the Bruegel masterpiece with the same title and to poems about the painting by William Carlos Williams and W. H. Auden. In this 22-line poem Bang recalls the last time she saw her son, standing on a subway platform after they had admired mosaics at the Met, and reflects that their day should be embedded in amber. Then, in the chilling final lines, she suggests a brutal truth about the isolating effect of death: “ … And how can it be / that this means nothing to anyone but me now.” Bang knows what Auden meant when he wrote in “Musee des Beaux Arts” that “everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster.” And in “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” she deals with this ageless idea in a way that is fresh and memorable.

Consider reading instead: Anne Porter’s Living Things, which has both new poems and all of those collected in her An Altogether Different Language, a National Book Award finalist www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/03/28/. Living Things includes the wonderful poem “For My Son Johnny,” Porter’s elegy for her son, who had what she believes was autism or schizophrenia. Bang tells you so little about her son Michael that Elegy is almost a misnomer and Grief might have been a better title. You don’t feel you know Michael from the book — you how his mother experienced his death. This isn’t a “flaw.” Poets have a right to choose their subjects. But Porter’s son Johnny is so alive on the page in “For My Son Johnny” that you learn more about him from one poem than you do about Bang’s son from her entire book. Poetry groups might want to compare how two admired contemporary poets have portrayed the loss of a mature child.

Furthermore: Bang has written four other collections of poetry. She is a professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program at Washington University. “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” appeared in The New Yorker. Other poems in the collection have appeared publications that include Poetry and The Paris Review.

[Update, 11:10 p.m., March 10: Wikipedia has deleted the sentence saying that Beah’s parents may be alive that is discussed in the post below. But it’s war over there at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_Beah, so don’t expect this to last. And the entry still contains material that directly contradicts statements made by Beah or others. I’ll try to comment briefly on the mess the next day or so. Jan]

More bizarre changes in the entry for the author of A Long Way Gone, who claims he was a child soldier in Sierra Leone for more than two years

What is going on with the entry for Ishmael Beah on Wikipedia? The online encyclopedia is now saying that Beah’s parents may not be dead. Instead his parents “left” — whether they left their village or country is unclear — after war broke out in Sierra Leone: “No one knows where they are now.”

This statement contradicts an excerpt from A Long Way Gone in the New York Times Magazine in which Beah said his parents and brother were dead:

“After I discovered that my parents and two brothers had been killed, I felt even more lost and worthless in a world that had become pregnant with fear and suspicion as neighbor turned against neighbor and child against parent.”

The latest change on Wikipedia also contradicts other statements Beah has made and entries about him that have appeared on the encyclopedia for more than six months. It further implies that he had one brother when he says in his book that he had two.

Some of these changes are a baffling. Slate says Beah’s friends and foes have made competing changes in his Wikipedia listing www.slate.com/id/2185928/. But you can’t always tell which camp has made them.

You might assume that the latest change, suggesting that Beah’s parents might be alive, had come from a detractor who wanted to discredit the author’s repeated claims that his family is dead. But it could also have come from a friend who knew that Beah’s parents or a brother might be about to come forward – an ally who wanted to help Beah backpedal and who had leaked material, the way political campaigns do, as a trial balloon. The idea that Beah’s parents might be alive appeared on Wikipedia three days ago and, because anybody can edit its entries, his PR team has apparently allowed it to remain in place.

In either case, why does Wikipedia keep allowing the site to be used like this?